School board to vote on plan to address overcrowding at Bluffton middle schools

A plan to ease crowding at Bluffton middle schools by returning 9th-graders to high school and installing temporary classrooms heads to the Beaufort County School Board for a vote Tuesday.

A community committee of 27 members recommends placing two modular units of 23 rooms at Bluffton High School, which would take in 9th-graders from Bluffton and H.E. McCracken middle schools.

Modular classrooms are self-contained structures of individual classrooms that require less space than individual mobiles, said Terry Bennett, director of grant management for the district. Using new mobiles would cost the district about $1 million versus about $600,000 for slightly used and $2 million for the modular option, which includes additional office space and other benefits, Bennett said.

“It has a much smaller footprint and looks more like a regular classroom building, with a lot of advantages for instructional devlivery, collaboration and safety for students,” he said.

Under the current structure sixth-graders and seventh-graders attend Bluffton Middle School while H.E. McCracken Middle School hosts the eighth and ninth grades. That 2011 arrangement and a construction expansion at Bluffton Middle School that lifted capacity to 1,100 students came about as a two-to-three-year fix for overcrowding at Bluffton High School, which only serves grades 10 through 12.

With an enrollment of 1,007, Bluffton Middle School stands at 97 percent capacity, with enrollment expected to top 1,031 by 2014. Enrollment at McCracken is already 37 students over capacity at 946 and expected to rise to 969 in 2014.

The committee concluded that reverting to the original structure and adding temporary classrooms to Bluffton High — currently at 78 percent capacity — allows the middle schools to operate under capacity for 4 years, according to its report.

The district would pay for the modular plan out of previously approved capital funds.

Still at issue, though, is what to do about longer-term solutions to growing student populations in Bluffton.

The community committee’s next step will be assessing options to accommodate that growth and deliver recommendations to the school board in early May.

Ideas under consideration are constructing a new high school and middle school in the New Riverside area, building a new school on the Davis tract that could work under a number of different grade configurations and others as the work progresses, Bennett said.

“All those ideas will be vetted out completely to figure out the costs and what’s best,” he said.

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This article posted March 3, 2013. It is now March 20, 2013 and nothing has been voted on. There is no solution and now my upcoming 6th graders are going to be cramped in the extremely overcrowded middle school. There seems to be no accoutablility on the part or the school board or the committee put together to solve this problem.

Please do something....write something to draw attention to this unacceptable situation!